Acer Aspire S5 specs & MagicFlip I/O panel

There were so many neat Ultrabooks at CES 2012 that we didn’t have the time to talk about each model in detail, therefore today we thought we would talk about some models which we overlooked last week, today we will let you know all about the Acer Aspire S5 and why there was so much of a buzz surround this upcoming offering.

The S5 is said to arrive in Q2 of this year, we don’t have a full spec listing or price information yet, but we do enough information to give you a pretty detailed product overview, also while we are here we will tell you what the guys over at SlashGear had to say about the S5 which they got their hands on a few days ago.

You can see Acer’s official press release here, this reveals that all S5 Ultrabooks will boast Intel Core processors (2nd-gen Core i3, i5 and i7 options we presume), this in turn means that there will be DDR3 RAM options. As for storage it looks like Acer are snubbing hard disk drive technology in favor of solid-state options, that said we wouldn’t be too surprised if some cheaper HDD options arise upon release. We don’t know a great deal about the display, but we can reveal that it has a 13.3-inch diagonal, we have also been promised professionally-tuned Dolby Home Theater v4 audio.

Other specs which we can confirm include 1x HDMI-out, 2 x USB 3.0 ports and 1 x 20 Gbps Thunderbolt, all of which are hidden by Acer’s unique MagicFlip I/O panel, this panel is activated by pressing a button located near the top-right corner of the keyboard it then expands and contracts to reveal/hide these ports. This neat feature not only looks cool but also allows the Ultrabook to be just 15mm thin at it’s thickest point – this undercuts the MacBook Air’s thickest point by 2mm, however at 3 pounds the S5 is a little heavier than the 13-inch MacBook Air. At the bottom of this post we have embedded a video which shows the MagicFlip I/O panel.

When SlashGear tested out the S5 they seemed very impressed by it’s solid build quality and desirable aesthetics, they weren’t amazed by the I/O panel or the keyboard, but ultimately they spotted nothing which put them off too much, however we have to remember that no pricing information has been disclosed just yet.

For more information about the S5 and the features it offers out-of-the-box check the link to Acer’s press release in this post’s third paragraph, do you like the MagicFlip I/O panel feature?